Ars Reviews iLife ’09: making the cut with iMovie and iPhoto

The latest version of Apple's popular iLife suite of media applications brings …

Sharing

Besides importing and sorting all of your digital photos, another big part of using iPhoto is sharing your photos with others. iPhoto '09 retains the options to upload to a MobileMe or iWeb gallery, create prints, photo books, calendars and cards, watch a slide show, send to iDVD, or burn to optical media. It also adds the option to upload images to a Flickr or Facebook account. When uploading to Flickr, albums or events are converted to sets, and any keywords set will be converted to tags. When uploading to Facebook, albums or events are converted to a Facebook album, and any images that have names that match people in your friends list will be tagged with their name. Flickr will keep your uploads in sync, meaning if you delete an image from iPhoto, it'll be deleted from Flickr and vice versa. But beyond that, there's not much control over the process. It will suffice for most users, but if you're more particular in how things get uploaded, and what metadata is passed along, you may prefer to use something more advanced like Fraser Speirs' FlickrExport plugin.

If you are creating a slide show, there are also a selection of new themes. In addition to the "Classic" and "Ken Burns" themes of iPhoto's past, there are the impressive Shatter and Sliding Panels themes, as well as the cute Snapshots and Scrapbook themes. If you have an aging Mac, not all of the new themes will be available. Users with Intel-based Macs are safe, however.

Another fun addition, if you are making a travel book, is that iPhoto can generate travel maps marking the places you've been on your trip. This is similar to the travel maps and globes feature in iMovie '09, though iPhoto's version will use geo tags from the images in your book to generate the place markers.

Improved Editing

iPhoto '09's improved editing features also deserve a mention. I often use iPhoto for basic photo editing, and the new adjustment panel offers even easier tweaking than before. In addition to the exposure, contrast, and brightness controls, as well as the histogram, the panel adds Aperture-inspired Definition, Highlights, and Shadows controls, and a vastly improved de-noise slider. These tools can really bring out the best in pictures taken under less-than-ideal lighting.

The saturation slider now has an "Avoid saturating skin tones" check box that will keep faces from looking unsightly while bumping up a blue sky, for instance. And along with temperature and tint sliders, an eyedropper makes setting the white point even easier. Also, settings for one image can be easily copied and pasted to other similar images, making applying edits to a range of similar images quick and painless.

The original image (top) had a blue-ish cast from an overcast sky and the tone was a little contrasty from some backlighting. Using the Adjustments panel, I got rid of the blue cast, tweaked the tonal range, and brought down the saturation for a soft, contemporary look (bottom).

The red-eye reduction feature gains a new auto feature linked to face recognition. The results weren't bad, but I was more pleased with manual results. And new image effects, similar to those in Photo Booth, can be applied with one click. Multiple clicks result in more pronounced effects for some, like Vignette and Boost Color, and control- or right-click will reduce the effect.

Conclusion

Faces and Places may not be mind-blowing features, but I found them incredibly useful and even fun. Both features will likely come to be seen as one of those, "Why didn't we always do it this way" sorts of things. As GPS becomes more ubiquitous, automated geo-tagging will make Places even more useful, and likely improvements in the face recognition software should do the same for Faces. The further UI tweaks and refinement of the editing tools can make iPhoto the only image app many will ever need.

iMovie '09

iMovie '08 shunned many standard conventions of non-linear editors in an effort to make editing and sharing videos easier and faster for the casual user. However, its fairly radical new approach left many iMovie HD users completely unsatisfied. As a compromise, Apple made iMovie HD available to download, and a lot of people with experience in the "old way" of doing things were content to simply keep using iMovie HD.

Everything in iMovie '09 is easily accessible in one screen.

iMovie '09 does not return to the timeline paradigm used by most NLE software, but instead refines and enhances the new direction set out by iMovie '08. The addition of a precision editor and a pretty amazing image stabilization feature complement the refinements to the project and video clip organization as well as the new titles, transitions, and automated green screen, making powerful video editing capabilities accessible to mere mortals.